Once I started reading this book I couldn’t put it down. At work I kept sneaking off to the bathroom so I could get in a few chapters after lunchtime.

The story is centered around the identical twins Stella and Desiree Vignes, who grow up in the town of Mallard outside of New Orleans. Mallard was “a town that, like any other, was more idea than place. The idea arrived to Alphonse Decuir in 1848, as he stood in the sugarcane fields he’d inherited from his father who’d once owned him. The father now dead, the now-freed son wished to build something on those acres of land that would last for centuries to come. A town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated as Negroes. A third place.”

The interstitial “third place” which is the basis for the founding of Mallard, is expressed in the struggles the Vignes twins face when they run away to New Orleans at age 16. Away from Mallard, the girls see their light skin against the segregated societies of whites and blacks in New Orleans. In this new context they choose very different paths as one twin connects with her darker roots, while the other opts to blend in with the lighter.

Marriage in The Vanishing Half takes a bad rap – the most successful relationships are never formalized by marriage, but are makeshift and unconventional. The married couples are torn apart by some form of racial injustice; most dramatically the twins’ father who is brutally lynched and killed when they were younger, leaving their mother a widow and struggling in poverty. More generally all relationships in this book are marked by the influence of past traumas, and the girls’ witnessing of their father’s death effects both girls, although in different ways.

The Vanishing Half is very much of this time, and the compelling story allows us to look at complex relations of race and class through a slightly different lens. I give this book a 4.5 👍 out of 5 👍.